Are your friends posting ‘privacy requests’ on Facebook?

Don’t get sucked in by another Facebook status message telling you how to protect your privacy. It doesn’t do what it claims.

Recently, this status has been floating around Facebook:

“I want to stay PRIVATELY connected with you. However, with the recent changes in FB, the public can now see activities in any wall. This happens when our friend hits “like” or “comment”, automatically, their friends would see our posts too. Unfortunately, we cannot change this setting by ourselves because Facebook has configured it this way. So I need your help. Only you can do this for me. PLEASE place your mouse over my name above (do not click), a window will appear, now move the mouse on “FRIENDS” (also without clicking), then down to “Settings”, click here and a list will appear. REMOVE the CHECK on “COMMENTS & LIKE” by clicking on it. By doing this, my activity amongst my friends and my family will no longer become public. Many thanks! Paste this on your wall so your contacts would follow suit too, that is, if you care about your privacy. Thanks!”

SNOPES.com says following the instructions will only give a false sense of security. It doesn’t mean your updates will stop appearing in other peoples’ feeds, it just means YOU won’t see when your friends share statuses with a wider audience.

If you really want to control which of your statuses appear in your friends’ feeds, you can create lists and choose which list sees an update you post.

You can also adjust your general privacy settings. There’s a great article that can show you how here.